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America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#181

Post by Closi »

crote wrote: post #74
lnsru wrote: post #21

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid , they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Western lab…

> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!

Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.

The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#182

Post by sensanaty »

thaack wrote: post #28
lnsru wrote: post #21

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factor…

Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work that is harder and much less desirable.

How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#183

Post by al_borland »

lnsru wrote: post #21

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor.

While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.

I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.

I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#184

Post by rhubarbtree »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #160
mikewarot wrote: post #133

Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the j…

> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.

Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#185

Post by bsder »

thaack wrote: post #28
lnsru wrote: post #21

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factor…

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.

I'm SUPER doubtful of this.

When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.

Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#186

Post by rhubarbtree »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

Why is that the case?

If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much?

We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence.

OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#187

Post by huevosabio »

mullingitover wrote: post #44

The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services . Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to g…

Thank you, absolutely agree.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#188

Post by agubelu »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

Even assuming that's the case, everyone's acting like throwing more GPUs at the problem is somehow gonna get them to AGI

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#189

Post by alsetmusic »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #170
Spooky23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking. I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car. When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American…

> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu? Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.

Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#190

Post by atleastoptimal »

agubelu wrote: post #188
atleastoptimal wrote: post #178

Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

Even assuming that's the case, everyone's acting like throwing more GPUs at the problem is somehow gonna get them to AGI

Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the problem.

GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL, architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate of improvement we're seeing now.

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